Say you retype the day’s sales from your till into your accounts every evening, or you load an export from one program into another every month. A connection, often called an integration, lets those two programs exchange the data themselves. Nobody has to retype anything, and the software you already use can stay.
What an API is
Most connections run through an API (the letters stand for application programming interface). An API is the agreed way a program takes questions from other programs. Your till system says, in effect: ask me for yesterday’s sales in this way, and you get them back in this format. The maker describes those agreements in documentation, so a developer can work with them without access to the inside of the system.
What the API does not offer, a connection usually cannot reach, even if you can see it on your screen. Whether you can use the API at all also differs per package, and sometimes per subscription. If your package has none, it can sometimes still work with an export file that is loaded at fixed moments. That is simpler, but the data then lags behind what is in the package.
How a connection gets permission
Usually you log in as the administrator of your till or accounting package, you see which rights the other software asks for, and you confirm. The connection then gets its own access. You do not have to hand over your password, and you can usually withdraw that access later. So find out who the administrator of the account is at your business, because you will not get past this step without that person.
Read-only or also write
With read-only access, software can view your data but change nothing. With write access it can also add or alter things, like booking an invoice or changing a stock count.
Felix is built to connect read-only to a boutique’s till. It looks at who bought what and when, and from that suggests which customers the owner should contact. A till that is only being read stays as it was, even if the software reading it makes a mistake.
Whether a connection like that happens does not only depend on the technology. The vendor of the system also has to give access to the API. For Felix, that is the hurdle for the first pilot today: I don’t know yet whether I can get access to that boutique’s till. So check this before you count on a connection.
Sometimes you do need write access. Say your webshop has to put every sale into your accounts as an invoice. A connection like that takes more care. It has to recognise, for example, that a sale is already booked, so a dropped connection does not produce a duplicate invoice. You also want to be able to check what it wrote and when. If the package offers a test environment, a separate place with no real data, try it there first.
In any case, give a connection no more rights than it needs. If it only has to fetch sales, it does not need to reach your invoices.
Accounting packages
At Eagl I build and maintain connections to Exact Online, NetSuite and Business Central. These are ERP systems, packages in which a business keeps its accounts, often together with other administration such as purchasing or stock.
At first sight they do roughly the same work. Even so, each has its own API, with its own names and its own rules for permission, so you cannot simply reuse a connection for one package with another. If you are a developer, you will find the differences in Connecting to Exact Online, NetSuite and Business Central.
What a connection asks of you in practice
Two programs often call the same thing by different names. What your till calls a customer may be a debtor in your accounts, and a VAT rate can have a different code in each program. Someone has to work out that translation, and to do so that person has to understand how you work.
A connection also brings to light what is wrong in your data, like a customer who appears twice. Count on some tidying up.
Then there is the question of how fast it has to go. For an overview at the end of the month, an exchange once a night is enough. For the stock in a webshop you probably want a sale to come through sooner, and that takes more building.
A connection also needs maintenance. Makers change their APIs, and sometimes a service is briefly unreachable. The connection then has to try again later and report it if something keeps failing.
What you can check beforehand
You need no technical knowledge for this. With these answers a developer can quickly judge what is possible:
- Which package do you use, and on which subscription?
- Does that package have an API? The name of the package and the word API in a search engine usually lead to the documentation, and otherwise the supplier can tell you.
- Which data has to go where, and in which direction?
- How fast does it have to get there?
- Does customer data go to another service, and where does it end up? That comes up in What can AI do in a small business today?
- Who is the administrator of the account?
Read next
What's your idea?
Tell me what you're trying to build. I try to reply within one working day.